Prospective students
Apply online to any of UB's Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering Graduate programs
Colleen Bronner
Pursuing Ph.D. Environmental and Water Resources Engineering
As a graduate of the UB environmental engineering undergraduate program, I returned for the PhD … more
Transportation Systems Engineering
Projects
Overview
Addressing Design and Human Factors Challenges in Cyber-Transportation Systems
While transportation serves indispensible functions to society, it does have its own negative impacts in terms of accidents, congestion, pollution, and energy consumption. To improve traffic safety, the project develops and evaluates novel algorithms and protocols for prioritization, delivery and fusion of various warning messages so as to reduce drivers’ response time and workload, prevent conflicting warnings, and minimize false alarms. To improve traffic operations, the project will focus on the design of next generation traffic management and control algorithms for both normal and emergency operations (e.g. during inclement weather and evacuation scenarios). Both human performance modeling methods and human subjects’ experimental methods will be used to address the human element in this research. As the design and evaluation of CTS applications requires an effective development and testing platform linking the human, transportation and cyber elements, the project will also design and develop a simulator that combines the main features of a traffic simulator, a networking simulator and a driving simulator. The integrated simulator will allow a human driver to control a subject vehicle in a virtual environment with realistic background traffic, which is capable of communicating with the driver and other vehicles with CTS messages. Background traffic will be controlled by a realistic driver model based on our human factors research that accounts for CTS messages’ impact on driver behavior.
